The forums I administer were just upgraded and I'm running into some problems.

We have three basic types of forums on our system:

• public forums
• private user forums
• private staff forums

The public forums work fine, and the private staff forums can be controlled with user groups, but the private user forums are a problem. With the old version, they were controlled with passwords, but the new version doesn't seem to have the capability of password-protecting individual forums. I can give each forum a user group, but in order to allow the forum moderators to manage the groups, they would have to be able to edit users, and that would give them too much power.

I saw something in General settings (I think) about a limit to the number of users who can be invited into a forum (presumably adding them to a user group), but I can't find anything else about that in the documentation. Is there a way for a private forum moderator to invite people into their forum?

Other questions:

Is there a way to make it the default that new user groups have no access to any forum, so I can specify which forums they do have access to more easily than clicking a long list of radio buttons?

Why don't PMs in a user's PM list indicate the recipient of the PM?

password protection is insecure, as any user can hand out a password.

I myself I'd lke to see a way for users to request access to new groups (like in competing products), i think it'd be an easier way to manage groups.

And the participnts of a pm are listed in the pm, theres a dropdown and it should show at the bottom; the reason this doesn't show on the main pm index is because you can have X ammount of participants ina private topic.

I did write a mod for users in 6.x to add themselves to groups.

I don't think I still have the code - but it worked fine allowing members to pick their team, and then they would be assigned groups based on that team.

WEll, the thing is, you don't want people to add themselves to groups, as it'd be insecure; who's to say a 14 year old is joining an adult group tht discusses things which will otherwise get one arrested for curruption of a minor lol...

Requesting to join a group however, that would be nice...

Depends upon the context - as mine gave different forums depending upon their choice it did not matter.

It only allowed certain groups to be selected.

It offered no danger.

However it would be good allow people to request that they could join groups.

The private user forums are for game guilds. They need to be fairly secure, but not tightly secure. We want the guild masters to be able to administer their own forum with out admin action required. It's more important that it be simple and modular than it be highly secure.

As it stands now, the closest we can come to the functionality we had before is to have individual user groups for each forum that admins (which basically means I) have to manually add people to when they join a guild. The only alternative is to have them all be public, which defeats the purpose of having a guild forum.

Passwords allow the guild masters to decide who has access. Sure, there is occasional problem, but then they just ask for the password to be changed.

If we can't get this fixed, the forum owner (not me) is going to have to get his money back for the upgrade and switch to some other program. I know he doesn't want to do that, but we need to be able to host guild forums.

Well, in phpbb you can have a "group owner" and they can approve any group actions (adding users, kicking users out, accepting requests, sending invitations); so i think a systrem like they have would be awesome...

Would it be possible to get those features in the next version?

We've made a feature reuest on this before, and it's on my list; as is the list of requests are ginormous, so we'll hvae to see what kind of timeframe rick has.

As for the next version; I think that the featurelist is already set in stone.

Iliana - I think your issues are quite common for many site owners - I would like to see a system where we could give mods greater control over just their forum - including banning people from their forum.

Ultimately I would like to give groups (guild masters in your case) their own forum, which is linked membership wise to the main forum - but in which they control many features including headers, footers, portal settings, who can and can't see the forums etc..... whilst at the same time having joint forums with the main site.

If we do not have groups like this within the forum site, all that happens is that the groups break off, and set up a rival site just for them - helping to destroy the community. This might sound good for a forum company as it means more sales - but in reality it doesn't - these groups often will use a free stand alone system (phpbb for example) or use a free hosted service (which is precisely what we should be able to offer them!!!)